My first reac­tion when hear­ing that Safari was going to be avail­able on Win­dows was one of pure excitement…and shock. Seri­ously, who guessed that one?

As far as I’m con­cerned this is a very good thing for devel­op­ers. Hope­fully, now many of web devel­op­ers that only design for Win­dows will at least attempt to make their sites work in Safari. It will also be easier test­ing sites for me when I’m work­ing on a Win­dows machine.

Unfor­tu­nately, this is Safari 3, and if the WebKit builds are any indi­ca­tion of the improve­ments, most of the annoy­ing bugs in Safari 2 have been fixed. This means that I’ll still have to con­tinue test­ing with Safari 2 for some time to come. I read some­where (can’t remem­ber now) that the Safari 3 beta installer com­pletely over­writes your copy of Safari 2. Damn them! When will com­pa­nies quit doing this to us web developers/designers? I don’t want to have five com­put­ers just to test dif­fer­ent browsers.

Despite my excite­ment about having Safari on Win­dows, I have no inten­tion of using it as my pri­mary browser. As I’ve said before, a big part of my browser expe­ri­ence is how it fits in with the user expe­ri­ence of the oper­at­ing system it runs on. I’m not talk­ing about cou­pling browsers and OS’s (IE), just that a browser should look like it belongs on that system. I’ve never liked using Fire­fox on a Mac, and now I can defin­i­tively say that Safari looks just plain weird in Windows.

Yes­ter­day I was read­ing var­i­ous com­plaints how Safari ren­ders text on Win­dows. The common com­plaint seems to be that the text is blurry:

• What’s Wrong With Apple’s Font Ren­der­ing?

I heard this com­plaint echoed all over the blo­gos­phere yes­ter­day. My ini­tial reac­tion was to dis­miss most of these people as Win­dows users used to text that looks like it’s not anti-​aliased. As a graphic designer I have to say that I hate the way that browsers on Win­dows render text (IE7 is much better than the rest). I’ve always pre­ferred the way that text looks on OS X; that’s one of the rea­sons I prefer it as an oper­at­ing system.

So last night I tried out Safari 3 for Win­dows myself. I didn’t have any of the weird instal­la­tion or crash­ing prob­lems that many others have noted. Granted, I only took her for a short spin through the tubes. For the most part, I liked what I saw.

Sur­pris­ingly (to me), I noted that the text def­i­nitely looked a little bit blurry. I sup­pose after a time I’d get used to it, but I have to say that Safari seems to have gone to the oppo­site extreme as far as font ren­der­ing is con­cerned. Fire­fox gives us very pix­e­lated look­ing text while Safari gives us smooth and blurry. Hmmm.

Over­all, I think this is a great win for devel­op­ers across the board. Hope­fully this will increase the aware­ness that Safari does exist and some people do use it. For the aver­age Win­dows user, I’d say it’s kind of a non-​announcement. People using IE won’t care about Safari, and nobody in their right mind would ditch Fire­fox for it. Safari just doesn’t offer any­thing that Fire­fox doesn’t have for Win­dows. Also judg­ing from the secu­rity exploits that have already been released, it appears as though Apple has some­thing to learn about devel­op­ing browsers on Windows.